Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Atheism and Theism 69
to persist because they had survival value at an earlier stage of evolution, and
also because there are so many more ways in which a machine can go wrong
than there are ways in which it can go right.
Metaphysical Theism
Let us return from the special case of Christianity to the general question of
theism itself. My arguments in this essay against any form of theism have not
been apodeictic. As I remarked in section 1, there are no knock-down arguments
in philosophy. Premisses and even methodology can be questioned.
For example I have not surveyed all the many ways in which philosophers
have tried to deal with the problem of evil. Such would involve a voluminous
work. What I think we can do, instead of aiming at an apodeictic argument,
is to push the person who disagrees with us into a more and more complex
theory, involving more and more disputable premisses. There may be disagreement
on the relative plausibilities of premisses. In the end we may agree to
disagree, while nevertheless sticking to the assertion that there is an objective
truth of the matter, whether or not we can agree on what it is. Sometimes a
Wittgensteinian dissolution, rather than solution, of a philosophical problem
may occur, but the history of philosophy since Wittgenstein has made it
appear unlikely that if we think hard and long enough we will show the fly
the way out of the fly bottle. 112 Metaphysics cannot be avoided. But it need
not be apodeictic or entirely a priori.
A philosopher who thought he had an apodeictic disproof of the existence
of God was J.N. Findlay. He thought that all necessity was a matter of
linguistic convention, and that there was no sense in which God’s existence
could be necessary. 113 Any being that was not necessary might, he says
‘deserve the δουλεια canonically accorded to the saints, but not the λατρεια
that we properly owe to God’. In reply G.E. Hughes rightly rejected this view
of necessity. 114 (Recall the discussion in section 8 of logical and mathematical
necessity.) And indeed Findlay in a reply to Hughes and to A.C.A. Rainer
concedes that ‘proofs and disproofs’ hold only for those who accept certain
premisses. So ultimately we must, I think, resort to persuasion and considerations
of relative plausibility.
Let me return to what I called ‘the new teleology’, the consideration of
the ‘fine tuning’ and the beauty and wonders of the laws of nature, and the
emergence of conscious beings such as ourselves. Paul Davies, in his
The Mind of God, 115 holds that the universe is not ‘meaningless’ and that the
emergence of consciousness in some planet in the universe is not a ‘trivial
detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces’. The trouble with
this is that a purpose must be a purpose of some person or super-person. Talk
of ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ here therefore begs the question in favour of theism.